Circulars distributed from Fowler’s store in 1855 announced a Vegetarian Settlement Company, a joint-stock venture to create an “Octagon City” in Kansas of four miles square — or rather, almost square, as it was to be a giant octagon — in which vegetarian settlers living on octagon -shaped parcels of land would build octagonal farmhouses that radiated outward from an octagonal downtown of octagonal public buildings, culminating in one immense central octagonal structure and an octagonal public green. Octagon City was also raising capital to construct “A Hydropathic Establishment, an Agricultural College, a Scientific Institute, a Museum of Curiosities and Mechanical Arts, and Common Schools” — all octagonal, of course. It was to be a glorious vision of the progressive future, with neither slavery, meat, nor alcohol tainting its purity. Checks poured into 308 Broadwasy, with prospective settlers committing anywhere from $50 to $10,000 in funds toward the project.

Right here, along this Manhattan counter — this mahongany counter that no longer exists, that wind blows through — and filed in these rolltop desks that our eyes can no longer see, the letters came every day, excited and hopeful. A blacksmith from Rahway, a mapmaker from Philadelphia, a printer from Tennessee, and a whole contingent of farmers from Pontiac, Michigan; envelopes both scrawled out and finely inscribed by idealistic tradesmen and farmers rolled in from across the country. Utopia at last!

What families transported by their Fowler magazine articles into visions of pure country life among the glorious octagons found at the end of the trail, though was not quite what the woodcut illustrations in the Phrenological Journal had pictured. Settlers had been promised working gristmills, fine public buildings, and a veritable fairyland of Kansan natural beauty. What they got was mud and desolation. The splendiferous Central Octagon building proved to be a windowless mud-plastered cabin of about two hundred square feet … and it was square. The founders had promised tools for every farmer: settlers found precisely one plow provided to serve the entire city. The bewildered vegetarian pioneers contemplated these woes in wretched lean-tos and huts built of bark, shivering miserably on their dirt floors, since there were only two stoves for one hundred settlers. The promoter fled, and his eager and trusting Octagonians were quickly decimated by malaria and Indian raids. The settlement’s few survivors lacked even the wood to build coffins for their dead children.